Four Boats Stranded Summary

Like most evidence of colonization, Ken Lum’s Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White 2001 cannot be entirely seen from a fixed perspective. Because they are four scaled model boats, of historical significance, mounted on top of the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), a viewer must walk the perimeter of the building or enter the off-limits area on the rooftop to completely witness the installation. Working in ways similar to the investigations and discourse it aims to inspire, Four Boats Stranded engages the public in a postcolonial and critical analysis of the Coast Salish territory it marks.
Commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery Major Purchase Fund, the Canada Millennium Partnership Program of the Millennium Bureau of Canada,

When describing his design process, in relation to the Centennial Fountain in his 2001 artist talk, Lum says of the inscription, “You should read it, it’s funny. I couldn’t see making a piece which did not have some dialogue with the fountain” (Lum, 2001). The relationship between the two works of public art revises the narrative of globalization within Coast Salish territories to assert hidden and forgotten realities facilitated by the “forebears” who are celebrated in the fountain plaque. It is also interesting to note that Four Boats Stranded marks the Vancouver Art Gallery as the former Supreme Court of B.C., which was the institution that would have supported the colonial injustices represented in Lum’s public art. Lum (2001) refers to the role of the building as “the site of discriminatory action against the people of the Komagata Maru as well as other migrant peoples, and is now the seat of high art in the city, presenting work that both belies this history and that complicates and criticizes it.” In engaging forces of globalization, Four Boats Stranded acknowledges the dark side of racialized conflict as both historical and contemporary. Like the transnational trajectories they represent, each boat is designed to reference the distant and local cultural forces that fuse to create a state of

It is to “legitimately settle – not simply occupy a particular place or to exploit its resources but to become integral to the regularities and harmonies of its dynamic systems” (Allen, 2012). As illustrated by the Centennial Fountain plaque, primitive notions of settlement were enacted through markings that unilaterally communicated dominant versions of land ownership. In a post-structural, post-colonial era we are moving to new epistemologies as a result of transnational movements and deterritorialized cultures. Rita Wong asks, “What happens if we position Indigenous people’s struggles instead of normalized whiteness as the reference point through which we come to articulate our subjectivities?” (2008). This is a powerful query and rightfully posed with regards to Canadian identity. No truthful foundation can be generated without acknowledging Indigenous realities as well as those of every other foot that graces this land. Wong discusses becoming Canadian in relation to whiteness and an alliance of those groups who were “excluded by the Canadian nation in historically specific, racialized, gendered and classed ways” (2008). If the first step is to admit that something is wrong, then Four Boats Stranded is an excellent propellant towards the next steps. As a disruption of dominant, colonial frameworks, the red and yellow, black and white boats in full view for publics to engage